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After a few minutes, the team prays over Odhiambo, leaving a small store of sugar near his bedside. The visit clearly energizes Odhiambo as he shakes hands with each team member crowded into his closet-sized dwelling. The team zig-zags its way through many Kibera streets for the rest of the morning, visiting people known to be ill and uncovering new cases.

After returning to the Salvation Army compound, the teams discuss their field visits. Joshua Martin Bambo, a relatively new volunteer, opens up, telling the group of his harrowing journey from a career soldier to drug addict and finally selling his body for sex. As Bambo describes his turn to Christianity, he confesses for the first time that he is HIV positive, causing a stunned silence across the meeting room.

"When you visit it is a privilege," Bambo says, nodding to his guests. "We have a model. If we can cut HIV, it is our pride. Take this message to others in Africa." The silence within the group then dissolves into tears.

Then one of the visitors, Joyce Seitei of the Botswana Christian Council, tells the Kibera Salvationists: "In Botswana, the rate of infection is quickest of any worldwide. Our fear is being wiped off the face of the earth. I am challenged by seeing you do so much. You go out and do the work smiling. I'd do the same, but I don't know how. You have been a lesson to me."

Ian Campbell, a top Salvation Army officer, was also at the self-help group that day. As a physician and a leading expert in the church's response to AIDS, Campbell observes dozens of community response efforts. He gives high praise to the Kibera teams, then offers simple advice: "Stay simple in your approach. Think strategically all the time. Trust in God."

"You have come to Botswana at a time when we are counting bodies," David Modiega, general secretary of the Botswana Christian Council, tells Catholic, Protesant and Orthodox leaders gathered in Botswana. "There is more pain and less joy. Lifestyles have changed to burying bodies. The questions that we are asking in churches now are: Are we giving time to worship? Have we become too busy with death?" For the next five days, 50 people at the consultation will sing and weep, praise God and confess to each other, and, in the end, recommit themselves against the epidemic.

Campbell says it is no longer possible to see the AIDS epidemic as being outside the church: "The church has HIV. We have HIV." According to a church leader, one Salvation Army congregation in Kenya has lost about 60 members to AIDS.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2